The black hole that gets me is a love of complicated things. It seems like, given a choice between two different things that are equally capable of solving the problem, 9 out of 10 hairless apes will pick the one that has more switches and knobs.
I haven't tried literate programming, but one of the things that entices me about it is that my instinct says that it's a vaccine against unnecessary complexity. If you can't express it comprehensibly in both English and code, there's likely an easier way to do it.